As most of you know, the Roots are the greatest band in late night TV. They have made Late Night with Jimmy Fallon a huge success, and have also indicated that they are likely to follow Jimmy when he moves to take over the Tonight Show in a couple of years.

One audience favourite bit is “Freestylin with the Roots”. Jimmy goes into the audience, asks for some random facts, and then suggests a style of music that the Roots must perform the track in. Black Thought kills it, as always, but it’s also amazing how quickly the rest of the group is able to come up with a perfect sounding musical accompaniment.

So it’s been a LA minute since I’ve posted anything (yeah, it’s a phrase I just invented), but this was a little too good not to post. I think over the years, my opinion towards Timberlake has softened a lot. I’ve been a big backer of Fallon for a while though. I may have doubted him a little when I heard the Roots were moving to become a talk show backup band, but I stand corrected. Fallon’s been a bastion of hip hop on TV, and has had some of the best music acts perform live regardless of genre. So the other night, Fallon had Justin Timberlake on to talk about JT’s role in The Social Network. While on, they got chatting about JT’s love for hip hop. And, apparently, Sugar Hill Gang opened for N’Sync back in the day. Who knew? The two of them decided to bust out in what was actually a pretty awesome "evolution of hip hop" type video. Check it out.

Our boys, including the irreverent ?uestlove will be backing up Jimmy Fallon when he takes over for Conan in March. Conan’s moving up to take over for Jay Leno.

Watch his video blog announcement below, just so you can see it for yourself.

Personally I think it’s a huge loss to have the Roots give up touring to stay behind the scenes like this. Hopefully they’ll have a high profile on the show, and somehow I can imagine ?uestlove laughing along with Jimmy the way Kevin Eubanks laughed along with Leno. But it’s a sad day for hip hop.